Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

II. BYZANTINE GREECE

The period of more than a century which separated Alaric’s invasion from the accession of Justinian was not prolific of events on the soil of Greece. But those which occurred there tended yet further to accelerate the decay of the old classic life. Scarcely had the country begun to recover from the long-felt ravages of the Goths, than the Vandals, who had now established themselves in Africa, plundered the west and south-west coasts of Greece from Epeiros to Cape Matapan. But at this crisis the Free Laconian town of Kainepolis showed such a Spartan spirit that the Vandal King Genseric was obliged to retire with considerable loss. He revenged himself by ravaging the beautiful island of Zante, and by throwing into the Ionian Sea the mangled bodies of 500 of its inhabitants[25]. Nikopolis was held as a hostage by the Vandals till peace was concluded between them and the Eastern Empire, when their raids ceased. Seven years afterwards, in 482, the Ostrogoths under Theodoric devastated Larissa and the rich plain of Thessaly. In 517 a more serious, because permanent enemy, appeared for the first time in the annals of Greece. The Bulgarians had already caused such alarm to the statesmen of Constantinople that they had strengthened the defences of that city, and it was probably at this time that the fortifications of Megara were restored. On their first inroad, however, the Bulgarians penetrated no further into Greece than Thermopylæ and the south of Epeiros. But they carried off many captives, and, to complete the woes of the Greeks, one of those severe earthquakes to which that country is liable laid Corinth in ruins.

The final separation of the Eastern and Western Empires tended to identify the interests of the Greeks with those of the Eastern Emperors, to make Greek the language of the Court, and to encourage the Greek nationality. But from that period down to the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Imperial city grew more and more in importance at the expense of the old home of the Hellenes, and Greece became more and more provincial. But it seems an exaggeration to say with Finlay that during those eight centuries “no Athenian citizen gained a place of honour in the annals of the Empire.” To Athens, at least, belongs the honour of having produced the Empress Eudokia, wife of Theodosius II, whose acts of financial justice to her native land she may have prompted, such as that which, in 435, reduced the tribute of the dwellers in Greece by two-thirds, while she is said to have founded twelve churches in her native city, among them the quaint little Kapnikarea, so conspicuous a feature of modern Athens, if we may trust the belief embodied in the inscription inside. The daughter of an Athenian professor, Leontios, celebrated alike for her beauty and accomplishments, she went to Constantinople to appeal against an unjust decision which had enriched her brothers but had left her almost penniless. She lost her case, but she won the favour of Pulcheria, the masterful sister of Theodosius, and was appointed one of her maids of honour. She used this favourable position to the best advantage, gained the heart of the young Emperor, who was seven years her junior in age and many more in knowledge of the world, and had no scruples about exchanging paganism and the name of Athenais for Christianity and the baptismal title of Eudokia. She showed her Christian charity by forgiving and promoting her brothers; she kept up her literary accomplishments by turning part of the Old Testament into Greek verse; but she was accused of ambition and infidelity, the latter charge being substantiated by a superb apple, which the Emperor had presented to his wife, which she in turn had sent to her lover, and he, like an idiot, had placed on the Emperor’s table! She died in exile at Jerusalem, a striking example of the vicissitudes of human fortunes. Yet even in the time of her power, she could not, perhaps would not, prevent her husband’s persecution of the religion which she had abjured. His orders to the provincial authorities to destroy the temples or to consecrate them to Christian worship were not always carried out, it is true. But the pictures of Polygnotus, which Pausanias had seen in the Stoa Poikile at Athens, excited the covetousness of an Imperial governor, and the gold and ivory statue of Athena by Phidias vanished from the Parthenon for ever[26]; the temple of Zeus at Olympia was destroyed by an earthquake or by Christian bigotry, the shrine of Asklepios on the slope of the Akropolis was pulled down, while the heathen divinities became gradually assimilated with the Christian saints, in whom they finally merged. Thus Helios, the sun-god, was converted into Elias, whose name is so prominent all over the map of modern Greece; the wine-god Dionysos became a reformed character in the person of St Dionysios, and the temples of Theseus and Zeus Olympios at Athens were dedicated to St George and St John. By a still more striking transformation the Parthenon was consecrated as a church of the Virgin during the sixth century, and was thenceforth regarded as the Cathedral of Athens. The growth of Christianity is observable, too, from the lists of Greek sees represented at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, while the importance of Corinth as the seat of the Metropolitan of Achaia is shown by the synod which was held there to settle a point of Church discipline in 419. In spite, however, of its political separation from Rome, we find Greece making appeals to the Pope when grave theological questions arose. At this period the Archbishop of Salonika was regarded as the official head of all the Greek provinces in Europe, yet when he seemed to the orthodox Epeirotes to be affected with heresy, they sent in their adhesion to Rome.

Theodosius II was not content with the destruction of temples; he desired the final disappearance of such vestiges of municipal freedom as Constantine had spared. In the same spirit of uniformity in which he codified the law, he swept away the remains of Lycurgus’ system at Sparta and the Court of Areopagos. Yet, as institutions usually survive their practical utility in a conservative country, we are not surprised to find the name of an Eponymos Archon as late as 485. And the University of Athens still lived on, fighting the now hopeless battle of the old religion with all the zeal of the latest Neo-Platonic school of philosophy. The endowments of that school and the patriotism of rich Athenians, like Theagenes, one of the two last Archons, and known as the wealthiest Greek of his day, made up for the withdrawal of Imperial subsidies, and the bitter tongue of Synesios could still complain of the airs which those who had studied at Athens gave themselves ever afterwards. “They regard themselves,” wrote the philosopher, “as demi-gods and the rest of mankind as donkeys.” But the university received a severe blow when, in 425, Theodosius enlarged and enriched the University of Constantinople with a number of new professorial chairs. If his institution of fifteen professors of the Greek language and literature gave that tongue an official position in what had hitherto been mainly a Latin city, it also attracted the best talent—men like Jacobus, the famous physician of the Emperor Leo the Great—from Greece to Constantinople, which thus acted as a magnet to the aspiring provincials, just as Paris acts to the rest of France. The last great figure of the Athenian University, Proklos, whose commentaries on Plato are still extant, was engaged in demonstrating by the purity of his life and his doctrines that a pagan could be no less moral and more intellectual than a Christian. The old gods, deposed from their thrones, seemed to favour their last champion; so, when the statue of Athena was removed from the Akropolis, the goddess appeared to the philosopher in a dream and told him that henceforth his house would be her home. The famous Bœthius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was translated by our King Alfred, is thought to have studied at Athens in the last years of Proklos, and earlier in the fifth century the charming Hypatia, whom Kingsley has immortalised for English readers, may be numbered among the ladies who at that time sought higher education at Athens and softened by their presence the rough manners of the masculine students. But, with the death of Proklos, the cause of polytheism and the prosperity of the university declined yet more. The shrewd young Greeks saw that there was no longer a career for pagans; even the rich benefactor of Athens, Theagenes, was converted to Christianity. Justinian dealt the university its death-blow in 529 by decreeing that no one should teach philosophy at Athens, and by confiscating the endowments of the Platonic school. Seven philosophers, of whom the most celebrated was Simplikios, the Aristotelian commentator, resolved to seek under the benevolent despotism of Chosroes, King of Persia, that freedom of speech which was denied to them by Justinian. They believed at a distance that the barbarian monarch had realised the ideal of Plato—a philosopher on the throne; they went to his court and were speedily disillusioned. Home-sick and heart-broken, they begged their new patron to let them return to die in Greece. Chosroes, who was at the time engaged in negotiating a treaty of peace with Justinian, inserted a clause allowing the unhappy seven “to pass the rest of their days without persecution in their native land,” and Simplikios was thus enabled, in the obscurity of private life, to compose those commentaries which are still studied by disciples of Aristotle[27]. Thus perished the University of Athens, and with it paganism vanished from Greece, save where, in the mountains of Laconia, it lingered on till beyond the middle of the ninth century. The ancient name of “Hellenes” was now exclusively applied to the remnant which still adhered to the old religion, so much so that Constantine Porphyrogenitus[28] in the tenth century called the Peloponnesian Greeks “Graikoi,” because “Hellenes” would have still meant idolaters. All the subjects of Justinian were collectively described as “Romans,” while those who inhabited Greece came gradually to be specified as “Helladikoi.”

The reign of Justinian marked the annihilation of the ancient life in other ways than these. He disbanded the provincial militia, to which we have several times alluded, and which down to his time furnished a guard for the Pass of Thermopylæ. This garrison proved, however, unable to keep out the Huns and Slavs who invaded Greece in 539, and, like the Persians of old, marched through the Pass of Anopaia into the rear of the defenders. The ravages of these barbarians, who devasted Central Greece and penetrated as far as the Isthmus, led Justinian to repair the fortifications of Thermopylæ, where he placed a regular force of 2000 men, maintained out of the revenues of Greece. He also re-fortified the Isthmus, and put such important positions as Larissa, Pharsalos, Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, with the Akropolis, in a state of proper defence. But these military measures involved a large expenditure, which Justinian met by appropriating the municipal funds. The effect of this measure was to deprive the municipal doctors and teachers of their means of livelihood, to stop the municipal grants to theatres and other entertainments, to make the repair of public buildings and the maintenance of roads—the greatest of all needs in a country with the geographical configuration of Greece—most difficult. The old Greek life had centred in the municipality, so that from this blow it never recovered; fortunately, the Church was now sufficiently well organised to take its place, and henceforth that institution became the depository of the national traditions, the mainstay in each successive century of the national existence. Yet another loss to Greece was that of the monuments, which were taken to Constantinople to make good the ravages of the great conflagration, caused by the Nika sedition. The present church of Sta Sophia, which Justinian raised out of the ashes of the second, was adorned with pillars from Athens as well as marble from the Greek quarries, and thus once again, as St Jerome had said, other cities were “stripped naked” to clothe Constantinople. Earthquakes, which shook Patras, Corinth, and Naupaktos to their foundations, completed the destruction of much that was valuable, and the bubonic plague swept over the country, recalling those terrors of which Thucydides and Lucretius had left such a striking description in their accounts of the pestilence at Athens in the days of Perikles. The King of the Ostrogoths, Totila, after twice taking Rome, sent a fleet to harry Corfù and the opposite coast of Epeiros, plundered Nikopolis and the ancient shrine of Dodona. It was in consequence of this and similar raids that the Corfiotes finally abandoned their old city and took refuge in the present citadel, called later on in the tenth century from its twin peaks (Κορυφοί) Corfù, instead of Corcyra. The Bulgarians, a few years later, made a fresh raid as far as Thermopylæ, where they were stopped by the new fortifications. In short, the ambitious foreign policy of Justinian, the powers of nature, and the increasing boldness of the barbarians, contrived to make this period fatal to Greece. Yet the Emperor bestowed one signal benefit upon that country. By the importation of silkworms he gave the Greeks the monopoly, so far as Christendom was concerned, of a valuable manufacture, which was not infringed till the Norman invasion six centuries later.

The history of Greece becomes very obscure after the death of Justinian, and the historian must be content to piece together from the Byzantine writers such stray allusions as those chroniclers of court scandals make to the neglected fatherland of the Greeks. The salient fact of this period is the recurrence of the Slav invasions of Justinian’s time. We learn that in 578 or 581 an army of 100,000 Slavonians “ravaged Hellas” and Thessaly[29]; in 589, under the Emperor Maurice, the Avars, according to the contemporary historian, Evagrios, “conquered all Greece, destroying and burning everything[30].” This passage has given rise to a famous controversy, which at one time convulsed not only the learned, but the diplomatic world. In 1830 a German scholar, Professor Fallmerayer, published the first volume of a History of the Peninsula Morea during the Middle Ages, in which he advanced the astounding theory that the inhabitants of modern Greece have “not a single drop of genuine Greek blood in their veins.” “The Greek race in Europe,” he wrote, “has been rooted out. A double layer of the dust and ashes of two new and distinct human species covers the graves of that ancient people. A tempest, such as has seldom arisen in human history, has scattered a new race, allied to the great Slav family, over the whole surface of the Balkan peninsula from the Danube to the inmost recesses of the Peloponnese. And a second, perhaps no less important revolution, the Albanian immigration into Greece, has completed the work of destruction.” The former of these two foreign settlements in the Peloponnese, that of the Slavs and Avars, was supposed by Fallmerayer to have taken place as the result of the above-mentioned invasion of 589, and his supposition received plausible confirmation from a mediæval document. The Patriarch Nicholas, writing towards the end of the eleventh century to the Emperor Alexios I Comnenos, alludes to the repulse of the Avars from before the walls of Patras in 807, and adds that they “had held possession of the Peloponnese for 218 years (i.e. from 589), and had so completely separated it from the Byzantine Empire that no Byzantine official dared to set his foot in it[31].” A similar statement from the Chronicle of Monemvasia[32]—a late and almost worthless compilation—was also unearthed by the zealous Fallmerayer, who accordingly believed that he had proved the existence of a permanent settlement of the Peloponnese by the Slavs and Avars between 589 and 807, “in complete independence of the Byzantine governors of the coast.” It was in the coast-towns alone and in a few other strongholds, such as Mt Taygetos, that he would allow of any survival of the old Greek race, and he triumphantly pointed to the famous name of “Navarino” as containing a fresh proof of an Avar settlement, while in many places he found Slavonic names, corresponding to those of Russian villages. Another evidence of this early Slavonic settlement seemed to be provided by the remark of the very late Byzantine writer, Phrantzes, that his native city of Monemvasia on the south-east coast, which used to supply our ancestors’ cellars with malmsey, was separated from the diocese of Corinth and raised to the rank of a metropolitan see about this identical time, presumably because many Greeks had taken refuge there from the Slavs, and were cut off from Corinth. Finally, a nun, who composed an account of the pilgrimage of St Willibald, the Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Eichstätt, in 723, stated that he “crossed to Monemvasia in the Slavonian land,” an expression which Fallmerayer hailed as a proof that at that period the Peloponnese was known by that name. It need not be said that Fallmerayer’s theory was as flattering to Panslavism as it was unpleasant to Philhellenes. But it is no longer accepted in its full extent. No one who has been in Greece can fail to have been struck by the similarity between the character of the modern and the ancient Greeks. Many an island has its “Odysseus of many wiles”; every morning and evening the Athenians are anxious to hear “some new thing”; and the comedies of Aristophanes contain many personal traits which fit the subjects of the present king. Nor does even the vulgar language contain any considerable Slavonic element, although there are a certain number of Slavonic place-names to be found on the map, including perhaps Navarino. Moreover, the contemporary historian, Theophylact Simokatta, makes no mention of the invasion of 589, though he minutely describes the wars of that period. Yet, as we shall see later, there is no doubt that at one time there was a great Slavonic immigration into Greece, but it took place about 746, instead of in 589, and the incoming Slavs, so far from annihilating the Greeks, were gradually assimilated by that persistent race, as has happened to conquering peoples elsewhere.

But Fallmerayer was not content with wiping out the Greeks from the Peloponnese. He next propounded the amazing statement that the history of Athens was a blank for four centuries after the time of Justinian, and explained this strange phenomenon by a Slavonic inundation in that Emperor’s reign. In consequence of this invasion, the Athenians were said to have fled to Salamis, where they remained for 400 years, while their city was abandoned to olive groves and utterly neglected. These “facts,” which the learned German had culled from the chronicle of the Anargyroi Monastery[33], which, however, distinctly says “three years,” and not 400, and refers to Albanians, not Slavs, have since been disproved, not only by the obviously modern date of that compilation, which is now assigned to the nineteenth century, and which refers to the temporary abandonment of Athens after its capture by Morosini in 1687, but by the allusions which may be found to events at Athens during this period of supposed desertion. Thus, we hear of an heretical bishop being sent there towards the end of the sixth century, and we have the seal of the orthodox divine who was Bishop of Athens a hundred years later[34]. An eloquent appeal was made by the Byzantine historian, Theophylact Simokatta, to the city to put on mourning for the Emperor Maurice, who died in 602, and sixty years later another Emperor, Constans II, landed at the Piræus on his way to Sicily, spent the winter at Athens, and collected there a considerable force of soldiers. Even some few traces of culture may be found there in the century which followed Justinian’s closing of the university. St Gislenus, who went as a missionary to Hainault, and a learned doctor, named Stephen, were both born at Athens, and the former is stated to have studied there. Finally, in the middle of the eighth century, the famous Empress Irene first saw the light in the city, which had already given one consort to an Emperor of the East. Thus, if comparatively obscure, Athens was not a mere collection of ruins in an olive grove, but a city of living men and women which had never (as Zygomalas wrote to Crusius in the sixteenth century) “remained desolate for about 300 years.”

The attacks of the Slavs and of the newly-founded Arabian power marked the course of the seventh century. In 623 the Slavs made an incursion into Crete, and that island, of which we have heard little under the Imperial rule, was also visited by the Arabs in 651 and 674. But though the Cretans were forced to pay tribute to the Caliph, Moawyah, they were treated with kindness by the politic conqueror. About the same time as this second Arab invasion, and while the main Arab force was besieging Constantinople, a body of Slavs seized the opportunity to settle in the rich plain of Thessaly, and it is from one of their tribes that the present town of Velestino, so often mentioned in the war of 1897, received its name. Yet this tribe soon became so friendly that it assisted the Greeks in the defence of Salonika against a Slavonic army—a further proof of the readiness with which the Slavs adopted the Greek point of view. It is clear also that the command of the Imperial troops in Greece was regarded as an important post, for we find it entrusted to Leontios, who made himself Emperor. The Greek islands were still used as places of detention for prisoners of position. Thus Naxos was chosen as the temporary exile of Pope Martin I by the Emperor Constans II, and the future Emperor Philippicus was banished to Cephalonia.

A new era opened for the Empire with the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 716. In the first place, that sovereign completed the reform of the system of provincial administration, which had lasted more or less continuously since the time of Constantine. In place of the old provincial divisions, the Empire was now parcelled out into military districts, called Themes—a name originally applied to a regiment and then to the place at which the regiment was quartered. The choice of such a title indicates the essentially military character of the new arrangement, which implied the maintenance of a small division of troops in each district as a necessary defence against the Avars, Slavs, and Arabs, whose depredations had menaced provinces seldom exposed to attack in the old times. Six out of the twenty-eight Themes comprised Greece, as she was before the late Balkan wars. The Peloponnese, with its capital of Corinth, formed one; Central Greece, including Eubœa, formed another, under the name of Hellas, but its capital was Thebes, not Athens; Nikopolis, which comprised Ætolia and Akarnania, and Cephalonia (the latter created a separate Theme later on, and including all the Ionian Islands) were two more; the Ægean Sea, popularly known as the Dodekannesos, or “twelve islands,” composed one of the Asian Themes, and Thessaly was a part of the Theme of Macedonia. Both the military and civil authority in each Theme was vested in the hands of a Commander, known as strategós, except in the case of the Ægean Islands, where the post was filled by an Admiral, called droungários. Under the strategós were the protonotários or “judge,” who was a judicial and administrative authority, and two military personages, one of whom, the kleisourárches, was so-called because he watched the mountain passes, like the later Turkish derben-aga. So far as Greece is concerned, the eclipse of Athens by Thebes, perhaps owing to the silk industry for which the latter city was famous in the Middle Ages, is a very noticeable feature of the new administration.

Another reform of Leo the Isaurian aroused the intense indignation of the inhabitants of Greece. We have seen that the spread of Christianity in that country had been facilitated by the assimilation of pagan forms of worship in the new ritual. It was natural that a race, which had been accustomed for centuries to connect art with religion and to seek the noblest statuary in the temples of the gods, should have regarded with peculiar favour the practice of hanging pictures in churches. When therefore Leo, whose Armenian origin perhaps made him personally unsympathetic to the Greeks, issued an edict against image-worship, his orders met with the most bigoted resistance in Greece. It may be that a more searching census for the purposes of the revenue had already rendered him unpopular; but to those who know how strong is the influence of the Church in the East, and what fierce disputes an ecclesiastical question kindles there, the edict of the Emperor will seem ample ground for the Greek rising of 727. An eruption at the volcanic island of Santorin was interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure at the doings of the iconoclast sovereign; while Pope Gregory II addressed two violent missives to the Emperor, and probably encouraged the agitation in Greece, which still acknowledged him as spiritual head of the Church. The “Helladikoi,” as they were now called, and the seamen of the Cyclades fitted out a fleet under the leadership of a certain Stephen; and, with the co-operation of Agallianos, one of the Imperial military officials, set up an orthodox Emperor, named Kosmas, and boldly set sail for Constantinople—a proof of the resources of Greece at this period. But the result of this naval undertaking was very different from that which Greece had equipped on behalf of Constantine. A battle was fought under the walls of the capital between the two fleets. The Emperor Leo, availing himself of the terrible invention of the Greek fire, which had been used with such deadly effect in the recent Saracen siege of Constantinople, annihilated his opponents’ vessels. Agallianos, seeing that all was lost, leaped into the sea; Stephen and Kosmas fell by the axe of the executioner. We are not told what punishment was meted out to the Greeks, but, in consequence of the strong attitude of opposition which the Papacy had taken up to the Emperor, Leo in 732 deprived the Pope of all jurisdiction over Greece, and placed that country under the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The next important event in the history of Greece was the great plague, which broke out at Monemvasia in 746 and spread all over the Empire. The political consequences of this visitation were far-reaching. For not only was the population of Greece diminished by the increased mortality there, but it was further lessened by emigration to Constantinople, where there were openings for plasterers and other skilled workmen, and where great numbers had died of the epidemic. The place of these emigrants in the Peloponnese was taken by Slav colonists, and this is the true explanation of the Slavonic colonisation, which Fallmerayer placed so much earlier. In the celebrated words of the Imperial author, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, “All the open country was Slavonised and became barbarous, when the plague was devouring the whole world[35].” It seems from the phrase “open country,” that such Greeks as remained behind crowded into the towns, and that the rural districts were thus left free for the Slavs to occupy. And this is confirmed by the Epitome of Strabo’s Geography, compiled apparently about the end of the tenth century, which states that at that time “All Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were inhabited by Scythian Slavs.” The memory of this Slavonic occupation has been preserved by the Slavonic names of places, which Colonel Leake was the first to notice. That the Slavs excited the alarm of the Byzantine government is clear from the fact that in 783 Staurakios was despatched by the Empress Irene to crush their efforts at independence. The Empress was actuated by love of Greece as well as by motives of policy, for she was a native of Athens, like her predecessor, Eudokia. At the age of seventeen she had been selected by the Emperor Constantine Copronymos as the wife of his son, Leo IV, and the premature death of her husband left her the real mistress of the Empire, which she governed, first as Regent for her son and then as sole ruler, for over twenty years. One of the earliest acts of her Regency was to send the expedition against the Slavs. Those in Thessaly and Central Greece were forced to pay tribute; those in the Peloponnese yielded a rich booty to the Byzantine commander. But the Slavs were not permanently subdued, as was soon evident. Irene, for the greater security of her throne, had banished her five brothers-in-law to Athens, which was, of course, devoted to her, and was at that time governed by one of her kinsmen. But the five prisoners managed to communicate with Akamir, a Slav chieftain who lived at Velestino, and a plot was formed for the elevation of them to the throne. The plans of the conspirators fell into the hands of Irene’s friends, and the prisoners were removed to a safer place. Irene, however, was dethroned a little later by Nikephoros I, and banished to Mitylene, where she died. In spite of her appalling treatment of her son, whom she had dethroned and blinded in order to gratify her greed of power, tradition states that she showed her piety and patriotism by the foundation of several churches at Athens. Some of her foundations disappeared in the storm and stress of the War of Independence; others were removed to make way for the streets of the modern town; but the Church of the Panagia Gorgoepekoos, or so-called old Metropolis[36], which still stands, is ascribed to her, and the ruins of the monastery which she built and where she at one time lived strew the beautiful island of Prinkipo. Even with her death her native city did not lose its connection with the Byzantine Court. Among her surviving relatives at Athens was a beautiful niece, Theophano, who was married to a man of position there. Nikephoros, anxious, no doubt, like all usurpers, to connect his family with that of the Sovereign whom he had deposed, resolved that the fair Athenian should become the consort of his son, Staurakios. He accordingly snatched her from the arms of her husband and brought her to Constantinople, where her second marriage took place. But this third Athenian Empress did not long enjoy the reward of her infidelity to her first husband. Staurakios survived his father’s death at the hands of the Bulgarians a very few months, and his consort, like Eudokia and Irene, ended her life in a monastery.

The Slavs of the Peloponnese believed that their chance of obtaining independence had come during the troubled reign of Nikephoros, when the Saracens under Haroun Al Rashid and the growing power of the Bulgarians menaced the Byzantine Empire. They accordingly rose, and, after plundering the houses of their Greek neighbours, laid siege in 807 to the fortress of Patras, which was the principal stronghold of the old inhabitants in the north-west of the country. The Slavs blockaded the city from the land side, while a Saracen fleet prevented the introduction of supplies by sea. The besieged, knowing that the fate of Hellenism in the Peloponnese depended on their efforts, held out against these odds in the hope that they would thus give the Imperial commander at Corinth time to relieve them. At last, when all hope of deliverance seemed to have disappeared, they sent out a horseman to one of the hills in the direction of Corinth to see if the longed for army of relief was in sight. His orders were to gallop back as soon as he caught a glimpse of the approaching Imperialists and to lower the flag which he carried, so that his comrades in Patras might have the glad news at once. But his eyes in vain searched the road along the Gulf of Corinth for the gleam of weapons or the dust that would announce the march of soldiers. Sadly he turned his horse towards Patras, when, at a spot where he was in full view of the walls, his steed stumbled and the flag fell. The besieged, believing that help was at hand, were inspired with fresh courage, and, sallying from the gates, inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Slavs, which was followed up after the arrival of the relieving force three days later by the restoration of the Imperial authority along the west coast. At that age so great a victory was naturally ascribed to superhuman aid. St Andrew, the patron-saint of Patras, who, as we have seen, was believed to have suffered martyrdom there, and whose relics were then preserved there, had caused the scout’s horse to stumble and had been seen on a milk-white steed leading the citizens in their successful onslaught on the Slavs[37]. The gratitude, or policy, of the government showed itself in the dedication of the spoil and captives to the service of the church of St Andrew, and the Slavonic peasants of the neighbourhood became its tenants and paid it a yearly rent. The Archbishop of Patras, who had hitherto been dependent upon Corinth, was raised by Nikephoros to the rank of a Metropolitan, and Methone, Korone and Lacedæmon, were placed under his immediate jurisdiction. The political object and result of this step, which was ratified by later Emperors, was to hellenise the vanquished Slavs by means of the Greek clergy. Moreover, the policy of Nikephoros in organising Greek military colonies round the Slav settlements in Greece, tended to check Slavonic raids. Public lands were bestowed on these colonists whose establishment contributed much to the ultimate fusion of the two races. Thus, the defeat of the Slavs before Patras and the wise measures of Nikephoros prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slavonic State, like Servia or Bulgaria, and from that date the tide, which had at one time threatened to submerge the Greek nationality there, began to ebb. Of this phenomenon we shall be able to watch the progress.

A generation elapsed without a renewal of the Slav agitation in the Peloponnese; but about 849 a fresh rising took place. On this occasion the appearance of a Byzantine commander in the field soon caused the collapse of the rebels. Two Slavonic tribes, however, the Melings and Ezerits, which inhabited the slopes to the west, and the plain to the east of Mount Taygetos, were enabled by the strength of their geographical position to make terms with the Byzantine government, and agreed to pay a small tribute which was assessed according to their respective means[38]. The Church continued the work of the soldiers by building monasteries in the Slavonic districts, and from the middle of the ninth century the Greek element began to recover lost ground. Nearly all the Slavs and the last of the Hellenic pagans in the south of Taygetos were then converted, and the adoption of Christianity by the Bulgarians cannot have failed to affect the Slavonic settlers in the Byzantine Empire. Of the revived prosperity of Greece we have two remarkable proofs. In 823 that country raised a fleet of 350 sail for the purpose of intervening in the civil war then raging between the Emperor Michael the Stammerer and a Slavonic usurper, and this implies the possession of considerable resources. Still more striking is the story of the rich widow, Danielis of Patras. About the time of the Byzantine expedition against the Slavs of Taygetos, the future Emperor, Basil I, then chief groom in the service of a prominent courtier, was at Patras in attendance on his master, who had been sent there on political business. One day, as the comely groom was entering the church of St Andrew, a monk stopped him and told him that he should become Emperor. Shortly afterwards he fell ill of a fever, which, by detaining him at Patras after his master’s departure, proved to be a blessing in disguise. Moved by philanthropy or the prophecy of the monk, Danielis took the sick groom into her house, bade him be a brother to her son, and, when he had recovered from his illness, provided him with a train of thirty slaves to accompany him to Constantinople, and loaded him with costly presents. When, in 867, the monk’s forecast was fulfilled, and Basil mounted the Imperial throne, he did not forget his benefactress. He not only promoted her son to a high position in his court, but invited the aged lady to Constantinople. In spite of her age and infirmities, Danielis travelled in a litter, accompanied by 300 slaves, who took in turns the duty of carrying their mistress. As a gift to the Emperor, she brought 500 more, as well as 100 maidens, chosen for their skill in embroidery, 100 purple garments, 300 linen robes, and 100 more of such fine material that each piece could easily be packed away in a hollow cane. Every kind of gold and silver vessel completed the list of presents, which would not have disgraced a brother sovereign. When she arrived, she was lodged like a queen and addressed as “mother” by her grateful protégé. Basil’s gratitude was rewarded by fresh favours. Danielis called for a notary and made over to the Emperor and her own son a part of her landed estates in the Peloponnese. Finding that Basil had tried to atone for the murder of his predecessor, which had given him the throne, by the erection of a church, she had a huge carpet manufactured by her own workmen to cover the splendid mosaic floor. Once again, on the death of her favourite, she journeyed to Constantinople to greet his son and successor. Her own son was by that time dead, so she devised the whole of her property to the young Emperor Leo VI. At her request, a high official was sent to the Peloponnese to prepare an inventory of her effects. Even in these days a sovereign would rejoice at such a windfall. Her loose cash, her gold and silver plate, her bronze ornaments, her wardrobe, and her flocks and herds represented a princely fortune. As for her slaves, they were so numerous that the Emperor, in the embarrassment of his riches, emancipated 3000 of them and sent them as colonists to Apulia, then part of the Byzantine Empire. Eighty farms formed the real property of this ninth century millionairess, whose story throws light on the position of the Peloponnesian landed class, or archontes, at that period. Danielis was, doubtless, exceptionally rich, and Patras was then, as now, the chief commercial town in the Peloponnese. But the existence of such an enormous fortune as hers presupposes a high degree of civilisation, in which many others must have participated. Even learning was still cultivated in Greece, for the distinguished mathematician Leo, who was one of the ornaments of the Byzantine Court, is expressly stated to have studied rhetoric, philosophy and science under a famous teacher, Michael Psellos, who lectured at a college in the island of Andros, where his pupil’s name is not yet forgotten[39].

But while the Greeks had thus triumphed in the Peloponnese, they had lost ground elsewhere. Availing themselves of the disorders in the Byzantine Empire, when the Greek ships were all engaged in the civil war of 823, a body of Saracens, who had emigrated from the south of Spain to Alexandria, descended on Crete, at that time recovering from the effects of an earthquake, but still possessing thirty cities. Landing at Suda Bay, they found the islanders mostly favourable, or at any rate indifferent, to a change of masters. Reinforced by a further batch of their countrymen, the Saracens resolved to settle there. A Cretan monk is said to have shown them a strong position where they could pitch their camp; so they burnt their ships and established themselves at the spot indicated, the site of the present town of Candia, which derives its Venetian name from the Chandak or “ditch” surrounding it. The conquest of the island was soon accomplished—a clear proof of the islanders’ apathy when we remember the heroic defence of the Cretans in more recent times. Religious toleration reconciled many to the sway of the Saracens; in the course of years a number of the Christians embraced the creed of their conquerors, helping to man their fleets and sharing the profits of that nefarious traffic in slaves of which Crete, as in former days Delos, became the centre. One district, which we may identify with Sphakia, was permitted to enjoy autonomy. For Greece the rule of the Saracens in Crete was a serious misfortune. Cretan corsairs ably led by Christian renegades, in quest of booty and slaves, ravaged the Cyclades and the Ionian Islands, and menaced the coast towns of the mainland, whither the terrified inhabitants of Ægina and similarly exposed spots migrated in the hope of safety. The efforts of the Byzantine government to recover “the great Greek island,” which was now a terror to the whole Levant, were for more than a century unsuccessful, and during 138 years Crete remained in the possession of the Saracens. Occasionally their fleet was annihilated, as in the reign of Basil I, when the Byzantine admiral, hearing that they meditated a descent upon the west coast of Greece, conveyed his ships across the Isthmus in the night by means of the old tram-road, or diolkos, which had been used by the contemporaries of Thucydides, and has even now not entirely disappeared. By this brilliant device he took the enemy by surprise in the Gulf of Corinth, and destroyed their vessels. But new fleets arose as if by magic, and Basil was obliged to strengthen the garrisons of the Peloponnese. His successor, aroused to action by their daring attacks upon Demetrias and Salonika, both flourishing cities which they devastated and plundered, equipped a naval expedition, to which the Greek Themes contributed ships and men, with the object of recapturing Crete. But neither that nor the subsequent armada despatched by the Imperial author, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was destined to succeed. At last, in 961, the redoubtable commander, Nikephoros Phokas, restored Crete to the Byzantine Empire. But even at that early period, Candia began to establish the reputation which it so nobly increased during the Turkish siege seven centuries later. Its strong fortifications for seven long months resisted the Byzantine general; but he patiently waited for a favourable moment, and at last took the place by storm. The most drastic measures were adopted for the complete reduction of the island. The broad brick walls of Candia were pulled down; a new fortress called Temenos was erected on the height of Rhoka some miles inland, to overawe the inhabitants. Some of the Saracens emigrated, others sank into a state of serfdom. As usual the missionary followed the Byzantine arms, and the island attracted many Greek and Armenian Christians; the name of the latter still lingers in the Cretan village of Armeni; among the former were some distinguished Byzantine families, whose descendants furnished leaders to the insurrections later on. In the conversion of the Cretan apostates back to Christianity, an Armenian monk called Nikon, and nicknamed “Repent Ye” from the frequency of that phrase in his sermons, found a fine field for his labours. The Christian churches, for which Crete had once been famous, rose again, and the reconquest of the island gave to Nikephoros Phokas the Imperial diadem, to the deacon Theodosios the subject for a long iambic poem, and to Nikon the more lasting dignity of a saint. But, in spite of his efforts, not a few Arabs retained their religion, and the Cretan Mussulmans of Amari are still reckoned as their descendants.

The tenth century witnessed not only the recovery of Crete for the Byzantine Empire and for the Christian faith, but also the spread of monasteries over Greece. When Nikon had concluded his Cretan mission he visited Athens, where he is said by his biographer to have enchanted the people with his sermons, penetrated as far as Thebes, and then returned to Sparta, where he founded a convent and established his headquarters. Thence he set out on missionary journeys among the Slavonic tribes of the Melings and Ezerits, who had again risen against the Imperial authority and had again been reduced to the payment of a tribute. Those wild clans continued, however, to harry the surrounding country, and the monastery of St Nikon was only protected from their attacks by the awe which the holy man’s memory inspired. Long after his death he was adored as the guardian of Sparta, where his memory is still green, and the Peloponnesian mariner, caught in a storm off Cape Matapan, would pray to him, as his ancestors had prayed to Castor and Pollux. For Central Greece the career of the blessed Luke the younger was as important as that of St Nikon for the South. The parents of this remarkable man had fled from Ægina, when the Cretan corsairs plundered that island, and had taken refuge in Macedonia, where Luke was born. Filled with the idea that he had a call to a holy life, the young Luke settled as a hermit on a lonely Greek mountain by the sea-shore, where for seven long years he devoted himself to prayer. A Bulgarian raid drove him to the Peloponnese, where for ten years more he served as the attendant of another hermit, who, like the famous Stylites of old, lived on a pillar near Patras. After further adventures, he migrated to Stiris, between Delphi and Livadia, where the monastery which bears his name now stands.

The absorption of the Christianised Slavs by the Greeks was occasionally interrupted by the Bulgarian inroads, which now became frequent. Since the foundation of the first Bulgarian Empire towards the end of the ninth century, the power of that race had greatly increased, and the Byzantine sovereigns found formidable rivals in the Bulgarian tsars. About 929 the Bulgarians captured Nikopolis, and converted it into a Slavonic colony, which was only reconquered by considerable efforts. Arsenios, Metropolitan of Corfù, who was canonised later on, and was for centuries the patron saint of the island, where his festival is still celebrated and his remains repose, fell into the hands of these invaders, but was rescued by the valour of the islanders[40], and a new tribe, called Slavesians, probably an offshoot of the Bulgarians, made its way into the Peloponnese. The troublesome clans of Melings and Ezerits seized this opportunity to demand the reduction of their tribute, which had been raised after their last rising. The Government wisely granted their demand, and so prevented a formidable insurrection. Athens was also disturbed by a domestic riot. A certain Chases, a high Byzantine official, had aroused the resentment of the people by his tyranny and the scandals of his life. Alarmed at the threatening attitude of the inhabitants, who had been joined by others from the country, he took refuge at the altar in the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the ancient Parthenon. But the sanctuary did not protect him from the vengeance of his enemies, who stoned him to death at the altar, thus showing less reverence for the Virgin than the ancient Athenians had once shown under somewhat similar circumstances for the goddess Athena.

The Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about the middle of the tenth century, has left us a favourable sketch of the Peloponnese as it was in his day. Forty cities were to be found in that Theme, and some idea of its resources may be formed from the statement that the Peloponnesians excused themselves from personal service in an Italian campaign by the payment of 7200 pieces of gold and the presentation of 1000 horses all equipped[41]. The purple, parchment, and silk industries, as well as the shipping trade, must have yielded considerable profits to those who carried them on, and the presence of many Jews at Sparta in the time of St Nikon, who tried to expel them, shows that there was money to be made there. His biography represents that city—of which the contemporary Empress, Theophano, wife of Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas, was perhaps a native[42]—as possessing a powerful aristocracy, and as having commercial relations with Venice. The reconquest of Crete, by freeing the coast-towns from the depredations of pirates, naturally increased the prosperity of Greece. Schools rose again at Athens and Corinth, and from that time down to the beginning of the thirteenth century the country improved, in spite of occasional invasions. Thus, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel captured Larissa and carried off many of its inhabitants, as well as the remains of the Thessalian Archbishop, St Achilleios, which had long been the chief relic of the place. His standards were twice seen south of the Isthmus, and Attica was ravaged by his forces. To this period we may refer the statement above quoted that “all Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were occupied by Scythian Slavs.” But when they arrived at the river Spercheios on their return march, they were surprised by a Byzantine army and utterly defeated. The Emperor Basil II, surnamed “the Bulgar-slayer,” completed the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, and on his triumphal progress through Northern and Central Greece in 1019 found the bones of the slain still bleaching on the banks of the Spercheios. After inspecting the fortifications of Thermopylæ, he proceeded to Athens, which no Byzantine Emperor had visited since the days of Constans II. The visit was an appropriate sequel to the campaign. For the first time for centuries the Byzantine dominions extended from the Bosporos to the Danube, and the Balkan peninsula once again was under Greek domination. In the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the very centre and shrine of the old Hellenic life in bygone days, the victorious Emperor offered up thanks to Almighty God for his successes, and showed his gratitude by rich offerings to the church out of the spoil which he had taken. The beauty of the building, which he seems to have enhanced by a series of frescoes, traces of which are still visible, was justly celebrated in the next generation, and one curiosity of that holy spot, the ever-burning golden lamp, is specially mentioned by the author of the so-called Book of Guido, and by the Icelandic pilgrim, Saewulf. Other persons imitated the example of Basil, and the restoration or foundation of Athenian churches was one of the features of the first half of the eleventh century. Freed for the time from corsairs and hostile armies, Greece was once more able to pursue the arts of peace unhindered. During the great famine which prevailed at Constantinople in 1037, the Themes of Hellas and the Peloponnese were able to export 100,000 bushels of wheat for the relief of the capital. The chief grievance of the Greeks was the extortion of the Imperial Government, which aroused two insurrections after the death of Basil. The first of these movements took place at Naupaktos, where the people rose against “Mad George,” the hated representative of the Emperor, murdered him, and plundered his residence. This revolt was suppressed with great severity, the archbishop, who had been on the side of the people, being blinded, according to the prevalent fashion of Byzantine criminal law. Some years later, the inhabitants of the Theme of Nikopolis murdered the Imperial tax-collector, and called in the Bulgarians, who had risen against fiscal extortion like themselves. While Naupaktos held out in the West, the Thebans, then a rich and flourishing community, abandoned their silk manufactories, and took the field against the Bulgarians[43]. But they were defeated with great loss, and it has even been asserted that the victors occupied the Piræus with the connivance of the discontented Athenians.

This surmise, which has, however, been rejected by the German historian of mediæval Athens, rests upon one of the most curious discoveries that have been made in connection with the place. Every visitor to Venice has seen the famous lions which adorn the front of the arsenal. One of these statues, brought home as a trophy by Morosini from the Piræus in 1688, has upon it a runic inscription, which has been deciphered by an expert. According to his version, the inscription commemorates the capture of the Piræus at this period by the celebrated Harold Hardrada, whom our King Harold defeated at Stamford Bridge, and who, in 1040, was commander of the Imperial Guard at Constantinople. In consequence, it appears, of an Athenian rising, Harold had been sent with a detachment of that force, composed largely of Norwegians, to put down the rebellion. After accomplishing their object, the Northmen, in the fashion of the modern tourist, scrawled their names and achievements on the patient lion, which then stood, like the lion of Lindau, at the entrance of the Piræus and gave to that harbour its later name of Porto Leone. It would be difficult to find a more curious piece of historical evidence than that a monument in Venice should tell us of a Norwegian descent upon Athens.

Dissension among the Bulgarians led to their collapse, and Greece enjoyed a complete freedom from barbarian inroads for the next forty years, with the exception of a passing invasion by the Uzes, a Turkish tribe, who left no mark upon the country. Athens at this period was regarded by the Byzantine officials who were sent there as the uttermost ends of the earth, though at Constantinople Philhellenism had a worthy representative in the historian and philosopher Psellos, who constantly manifested a deep interest in “the muse of Athens.” A more curious figure, typical of that monastic age, was the Cappadocian monk Meletios, who established himself on the confines of Attica and Bœotia, and by means of his miracles gained great influence there. We find him descending from his solitary mountain to Athens to rescue a band of Roman pilgrims, who had taken refuge there and had been threatened with death by the bigoted Athenians. We hear of the convents which he founded in various parts of Greece, and it was to him that the land was largely indebted for the plague of monks, many of them merely robbers in disguise, which checked civic progress and injured all national life in the next century. Worse than this, the final separation of the Greek and Latin Churches in 1053, by kindling a fanatical hatred between West and East, brought countless woes upon the Levant, and was one of the causes of the Latin invasions which culminated in the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There now appeared, for the first time in the history of Greece, that vigorous race which in the same century conquered our own island. The Normans of Italy, under their redoubtable leader, Robert Guiscard, resolved to emulate the doings of William the Conqueror by subduing the Byzantine Empire, which seemed to those daring spirits an easy prey. They began by the annexation of the Byzantine provinces of Apulia and Calabria, and then turned their eyes across the Adriatic to the opposite coast. An excuse was easily found for this invasion. One of Guiscard’s daughters had been engaged to the son of the Emperor Michael VII. But the revolution, which overthrew Michael, sent his son into a monastery, and thus provided Guiscard with an opportunity of posing as the champion of the fallen dynasty. An impostor, who masqueraded as the deposed Emperor, implored his aid in the cause of legitimacy, and the great Pope, who then occupied the throne under the name of Gregory VII, bade the godly help in the contest against the schismatic Greeks. After long preparations Guiscard appeared in 1081 off Corfù, which surrendered to the Norman invader, and then directed his forces against the walls of Durazzo, now a crumbling Albanian fortress, then “the Western key of the empire.” Menaced at the same moment by the Turks in Asia and the Normans in Europe, the Emperor Alexios I made peace with the former and then set out to the relief of Durazzo. But he did not trust to a land force alone, and as the Byzantine navy, like the Turkish fleet in our own days, had been neglected and the money intended for its maintenance had been misappropriated, he applied for aid to the mercantile Republic of Venice. The Venetians saw a chance of consolidating their trade in the Levant, and, as the price of their assistance, obtained from the embarrassed Emperor the right of free trade throughout the empire, where the Greek cities of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Nauplia, Methone, Korone, Corfù, Euripos, and Demetrias are specially mentioned as their haunts. But the aid of a Venetian fleet did not prevent the victory of the Normans over Alexios on the plain near Durazzo, where Cæsar and Pompey had once contended. The Emperor retreated to Ochrida, where, two generations earlier, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel had fixed his residence, while his conqueror, after taking Durazzo, marched across Albania and captured the city of Kastoria, which was defended by three hundred English, members of the Imperial Guard. Recalled to Italy by troubles in his own dominions and by the distress of his ally the Pope, Guiscard left the prosecution of the campaign to his son Bohemond, who penetrated into Thessaly, that historic battle-ground of the Near East. But the walls of Larissa and the gold of Alexios proved too much for the strength of the Normans, and Bohemond was forced to retire to Italy. He found his father fresh from his triumph at Rome, which he had delivered to the Pope, and ready for a second campaign against the Byzantine Empire. In 1084 Guiscard set sail again; after three naval battles with the Greeks and their Venetian allies, Corfù once more surrendered to the Normans, and their leader used it as a stepping-stone to the island of Cephalonia. But he contracted a fever there, which put an end to his life and to the expedition, of which he had been the heart and soul. The village of Phiskardo has perpetuated his name, thus marking this second attempt of the West to impose its sway upon the East.

Bohemond renewed, twenty-two years later, his father’s attacks upon the Byzantine Empire. In the meanwhile, as the result of his share in the first crusade, he had become Prince of Antioch—one of those feudal States which now adjoined the immediate dominions of the Eastern Emperor and exercised considerable social influence on the customs of his subjects. Aided by the Pisans, whose fleet ravaged the Ionian Islands, Bohemond seemed likely to repeat the early successes of his father; but Alexios had learnt how to deal with the Latins, and the Normans’ second assault on Durazzo ended in a treaty of peace, by which Bohemond swore fealty to the Emperor. For the next forty years Greece had nothing to fear from the Normans, but the evil results of the alliance with Venice now became manifest. The Republic of St Mark had jealous commercial rivals in Italy, who envied her the monopoly of the Levantine trade. When, therefore, concessions were made to the Pisans and the previous charter of the Venetians was not renewed, the Empire found itself involved in a naval war with the latter, from which the defenceless Greek islands suffered, and which was only ended by the renewal of the old Venetian privileges. The mercantile powers of Italy had come to treat the Byzantine possessions much as modern European States regard Turkey, as a Government from which trading concessions can be obtained. But every fresh grant offended some one and gave the favoured party more and more influence in the affairs of the Empire. Fresh Venetian factories were founded in Greece, and the increasing prosperity of that country had the disadvantage of attracting the covetous foreigner.

Such was the state of affairs when, in 1146, Guiscard’s nephew, King Roger of Sicily, availing himself of an insult to his honour, invaded Greece with far greater success than had attended his uncle. The Sicilian Admiral, George of Antioch, occupied Corfù, with the connivance of the poorer inhabitants, who complained of the heavy taxation of the Imperial Government which in the twelfth century levied from that one Ionian Island about 9,000,000 dr. of modern money, or more than the present Greek Exchequer raises from all the seven, but was repulsed by the bold inhabitants of the impregnable rock of Monemvasia; then, after plundering the west coast, he landed his troops at the modern Itea, on the north of the Gulf of Corinth, and thence marched past Delphi on Thebes, at that time the seat of the silk manufacture. The city was undefended, but that did not save it from the rapacity of the Normans. Alexander the Great had, at least, spared “the house of Pindaros” when he took Thebes; but its new conquerors left nothing that was of any value behind them. After they had thoroughly ransacked the houses and churches they made the Thebans swear on the Holy Scriptures that they had concealed nothing, and then departed, dragging with them the most skilful weavers and dyers so as to transfer the silk industry to Sicily. This last was a serious blow to the monopoly of the silk trade which Greece had hitherto enjoyed so far as Christian States were concerned. The secret of the manufacture had been jealously guarded; and the fishers who obtained the famous purple dye for the manufacturers were a privileged class, exempted from the payment of military taxes. Roger was well aware of the value of his captives; he established them and their families at Palermo, and at the conclusion of the war they were not restored to their homes in Greece. But the art of making and dyeing silk does not seem to have died out at Thebes, which, fifteen years after the Norman invasion, had recovered much of its former prosperity. When the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, visited it about 1161, he found 2000 of his co-religionists there, among them the best weavers and dyers in Greece, and towards the end of the century forty garments of Theban silk were sent as a present by the Emperor to the Sultan of Iconium. Although there are no silks now manufactured at Thebes and no mulberry-trees there, the plain near the town is still called by the peasants Morokampos, from the mulberry-trees which once grew upon it. From Thebes the Normans proceeded to the rich city of Corinth, which fell into their hands without a blow. Those who have ascended the grand natural fortress of Akrocorinth may easily understand the surprise of the warlike Normans at its surrender by the cowardly Byzantine commandant. “If Nikephoros Chalouphes”—such was his name—“had not been more timid than a woman,” exclaimed the Sicilian admiral, “we should never have entered these walls.” The town below yielded an even richer booty than Thebes—for it was then, as under the Romans, the great emporium of the Levantine trade in Greece—and laden with the spoils of Thebes and Corinth and with the relics of St Theodore, the Norman fleet set sail on its homeward voyage. Nineteen vessels fell victims to privateers, but the surviving ships brought such a valuable cargo into the great harbour of Palermo that the admiral was able to build out of his share the bridge which is still called after him, Ponte dell’ Ammiraglio. The Church of La Martorana as its older name of Sta Maria dell’ Ammiraglio testifies, was also founded by him. The captives, except the silk-weavers, were afterwards restored to their homes, and Corfù was recaptured by the chivalrous Emperor, Manuel Comnenos, after a siege, in the course of which he performed such prodigies of valour as to win the admiration of the Norman commander.

The revival of material prosperity in Greece after the close of this conflict was most remarkable, and in the second half of the twelfth century that country must have been one of the most flourishing parts of the Empire. The Arabian geographer, Edrisi, who wrote in 1153, tells us that the Peloponnese had thirteen cities, and alludes to the vegetation of Corfù, the size of Athens, and the fertility of the great Thessalian plain, while Halmyros was then one of the most important marts of the Empire. Benjamin of Tudela tells us of Jewish communities in Larissa, Naupaktos, Arta, Corinth, Patras, Eubœa, Corfù (consisting of one man), Zante, and Ægina, as well as in Thebes, and this implies considerable wealth. Like St Nikon, he found them in Sparta, and we may note as a curious phenomenon the existence of a colony of Jewish agriculturists on the slopes of Parnassos. Salonika, where the Hebrew element is now so conspicuous, even then had 500 Jews. When we remember how rare are Jews in Greece to-day, except there and at Corfù, their presence in such numbers in the twelfth century is all the more strange. Nor were they all engaged in money-making. The worthy rabbi met Jews at Thebes who were learned in the Talmud, while the Greek clergy had also some literary representatives. It was about this time that the biography of St Nikon was composed; the philosophical and theological writings of Nicholas, Bishop of Methone, and Gregory, the Metropolitan of Corinth, belonged to the same epoch. Athens, after a long eclipse, had once more become a place of study. Yet, in point of wealth, Athens was inferior to several other Greek cities, and perhaps for that reason had no Jewish colony. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last Greek Metropolitan of Athens before the Latin conquest, who was appointed about 1175, a full if somewhat pessimistic account of the condition of his diocese, which then included ten bishoprics. Michael was a man of distinguished family, a brother of the Byzantine statesman and historian, Niketas Choniates, and a pupil of the great Homeric scholar, Eustathios, who was Archbishop of Salonika. An ardent classical scholar, he had been enchanted at the prospect of taking up his abode in the episcopal residence on the Akropolis, of which he had formed the most glorified idea. But the golden dream of the learned divine vanished at the touch of reality. It was said of the Philhellenes, who went to aid the Greeks in the War of Independence, that they expected to find the Peloponnese filled with “Plutarch’s men”; finding that the modern Greeks were not ancient heroes and sages, they at once put them down as scoundrels and cut-throats. The worthy Michael seems to have experienced the same disillusionment and to have committed the same error as the Philhellenes. Fallen walls and rickety houses fringing mean streets gave him a bad impression as he entered the city in triumphal procession. His cathedral, it is true, with its frescoes and its offerings from the time of Basil the Bulgar-slayer, with its eternal lamp, the wonder of every pilgrim, and with the noble memories of the golden age of Perikles which clung round its venerable structure, seemed to him superior to Sta Sophia in all its glory, a palace worthy of a king. And what bishop could boast of a minster such as the Parthenon? But the Athenians, “the off-spring of true-born Athenians,” as he styled them in his pompous inaugural address, did not appreciate, could scarcely even understand, the academic graces of his style. The shallow soil of Attica had become a parched desert, where little or no water was; the classic fountain of Kallirrhoe had ceased to run, the olive-yards were withered up by the drought. The silk-weavers and dyers, traces of whose work have been found in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, had disappeared. Emigration and the exactions of the Byzantine officials completed the tale of woe, which Michael was ever ready to pour into the ear of a sympathetic correspondent. In 1198, he addressed a memorial to the Emperor Alexios Comnenos III, on behalf of the Athenians, from which we learn that the city was free from the jurisdiction of the provincial governor, who resided at Thebes, and who was not even allowed to enter the city, which, like Patras and Monemvasia, was governed by its own archontes. But it appears that the governor none the less quartered himself on the inhabitants, and had thrice imposed higher ship-money on Athens than on Thebes and Chalkis. Nor did the Metropolitan hesitate to tell another Emperor, Isaac Angelos, that Athens was too poor to present him with the usual coronation offering of a golden wreath. Yet, when the Lord High Admiral came to Athens, he found merchantmen in the Piræus, and the Government raised more out of the impoverished inhabitants than out of Thebes and Eubœa. We must therefore not take too literally all the rhetorical complaints of the archbishop, which are incompatible with the great luxury of the Athenian Court under the French Dukes in the next century. As a good friend of Athens, he was anxious to make the city appear as poor as possible in the eyes of a grasping Government, for in the East it has always been a dangerous thing to appear rich. As a cultured man of the world, he exaggerated the “barbarism”—such is his own phrase, which would have staggered the ancient Athenians—of the spot where his lot had been cast. He derided the Attic Greek of his time as a rude dialect, and told his classical friends that few of the historic landmarks in Attica had preserved their ancient names pure and undefiled. Sheep grazed, he said, among the remains of the Painted Porch. “I live in Athens,” he wrote in a poem on the decay of the city, “yet it is not Athens that I see.” Yet Athens was at least spared the horrors of the sack of Salonika by the Normans of Sicily, whose great invasion in 1185 touched only the fringe of Greece.

Then, as in the war which broke out between Venice and the Empire some years earlier, it was the islands which suffered. After the attack by the mob on the Latin quarter of Constantinople, those Latins who escaped revenged themselves by preying upon the dwellers in the Ægean, whose flourishing state had been noted by Edrisi before that terrible visitation. Cephalonia and Zante were now permanently severed from the Byzantine sway, many Italians settled there, and after succumbing to Margaritone, the Sicilian admiral, Corfù, then a very rich island, became for some years the home of Vetrano, a Latin pirate, who was soon the terror of the Greek coasts. As if this were not enough, Isaac Angelos robbed many of the churches of their ornaments and pictures for the benefit of his capital, such as the famous picture at Monemvasia of Our Lord being dragged to the Cross, and extortion once more roused an insurrection in the Theme of Nikopolis. His successor injured Greek trade by granting most extensive privileges to the Venetians, who secured the commercial supremacy in the Levant. The Byzantine State was becoming visibly weaker every day, and the re-establishment of the second Bulgarian Empire suggested to a bold official, Manuel Kamytzes, the idea of carving out, with Bulgarian aid, a kingdom for himself in Greece. His attempt failed, but the growth of feudalism had loosened the old ties which bound that country to Constantinople. The power of the landed aristocracy, the archontes, as they were called, had gone on growing since the days of Danielis of Patras. Their rivalries threatened the Greek towns with the scenes which disgraced the cities of mediæval Italy, and some of them, like the great clan of Sgouros at Nauplia, were hereditary nobles of almost princely position. Large estates, the curse of ancient Italy, had grown up in Greece; the Empress Euphrosyne, for example, was owner of a vast property in Thessaly, which included several flourishing towns. Moreover, that province was no longer inhabited by a mainly Greek population; in the twelfth century it had passed so completely under Wallachian influence that it was known as Great Wallachia, and its colonists were the ancestors of those Koutso-Wallachs, who still pasture their herds in the country near the Thessalian frontier, descending to Bœotia in the winter, and who, in the war of 1897, were on the Turkish side. Finally a debased currency pointed to the financial decline of the Byzantine Government. In short, the Empire was ripe for the Latin conquest. It was not long delayed.